


Moonlight Rendezvous

by omg_okimhere



Category: Ripper Street
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-06
Updated: 2018-04-06
Packaged: 2019-04-19 08:54:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14233746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/omg_okimhere/pseuds/omg_okimhere
Summary: Two lovers take a nighttime hike, around the time of the summer solstice.  Bennet has a plan, Francine has a secret.





	Moonlight Rendezvous

“Confound it, woman!  Slow down!  Yer like a billy goat!”

Bennet’s foot slips on the mossy, rock-hewn staircase despite the old copper’s boots covering his feet, and he huffs out a low curse.  Up ahead in the starlight, Francine gives a laugh but slows her stride, unencumbered by skirts though she is.

“I admit, I have mounted this path many times,” she allows, her breathing easy.

Even the most fit of men – or women -- might find the approach to the Druid Seat challenging; yet for Francine, it is a muscle memory near as old as she herself.  How many times did she escape here as a child, with her poetry books or her starmaps?  A special place, a secret place, a place she loves – and now will share with the man she loves, along with a special secret.

Francine holds out her hand in encouragement.  Pulling in a deep lungful, Bennet concentrates on her long-legged silhouette until he gains the same ancient riser she occupies, and engulfs her palm in his.

“Was it truly necessary to come at midnight?” he asks with good-natured skepticism. 

When Francine had said she wanted to show him her favorite girlhood refuge, he had imagined a hike to a hidden glade or an untouched meadow -- not a climb up a wooded hillside when the moon was full.   Nevertheless, the sojourn fits into his own plans perfectly.  He pats his inside vest pocket without thinking and raises an eyebrow, waiting for an answer.   

“’Tis the best time,” Francine assures him softly, squeezing his sweaty knuckles with her slender fingers.

They pause for a few moments, letting the mild midsummer breeze brush across their flushed cheeks.  Out in the night, the song of crickets beckons them to the summit.

Hand-in-hand, the couple continues their ascent, keeping pace now with each other.  After negotiating a particularly treacherous section of crumbling stonework with ease, Francine looks down at her attire appreciatively.

“Many thanks for the lend of your trousers,” she teases, knowing the proper Victorian gentleman had been a bit askance when she suggested such.  But there is no doubt, the freedom of movement makes climbing the stairway of the pagans much easier.

“They seem a good fit,” Bennet replies gruffly, but he cannot hide his grudging grin.  Fit and fetching, he might add, but does not.

Francine frowns, making an unconscious adjustment beneath her blouse. 

“Waistband is a bit tight.”  Then, abruptly, she drops her hand and looks away, hiding her face.  Bennet, his focus on what looms above them, does not notice.

They crest the rising terrain just as the moon floats into view.  Its shimmering light bathes the circle of standing stones in eerie shadows, evoking the ghosts of a people now lost to time.  Once the temple had been a contiguous corral, with tabled arches and a central monolith; now many of the cross pieces have fallen, leaning askew like half-tipped dominoes.  Yet the main archway still stands, its slate square perfectly framing the creamy face of the celestial body once celebrated on this ground.

Reverently, Bennet and Francine enter the ruins, mindful of the past, the present, the power of this place.

“I have never seen the like,” breathes Bennet in wonder, his neck craning from side to side.  His wandering eyes sweep back to the woman beside him.  “It is a wondrous thing you show me.”

Francine’s countenance is tipped to the ebony and diamond skies.

“I made the hike oft to this spot as a young girl.  By day, to read.  By night, to dream,” she whispers wistfully past the lump in her throat.  “I thought I might count the stars.”

Bennet draws her close, gently brushing a ginger tendril of hair off her neck.  It is a romantic notion, to be sure, coming here at the full moon.  So much the better, he thinks, for the time is full as well.

“If I could, Frannie, I’d pull down the brightest star in the heavens, and put it on your finger.”  He gazes at her hopefully, a sudden cache of butterflies coming to life in his stomach.

Francine stares at his earnestly knit features, at a loss for words.  What half-formed poetry is this?

“Why?” she asks carefully, looking for his meaning.

Taken off-guard by her question, Bennet stumbles in his prepared speech and instead replies pragmatically.

“To keep the townsfolk from gossiping about what goes on at Stone’s Throw.”

Francine’s heart sinks in dismay.  “Not the right answer, Bennet Drake.”  Her eyes flash.  “I told you once before, my reputation is no concern of mine.  Or yours.”

Bennet hangs his head.  “That was clumsy,” he mumbles, chagrined, as internally he abandons his script and rallies his sentiments.

Francine takes a step back, piercing him with a look of hope and sadness.

“I know your heart has been shattered too many times to ever feel a young man’s unguarded ardor again.  But you will needs do better than that, if you are proposing what I think you are.”

“You are both right and wrong.”  Bennet’s blue eyes brim with twinned honesty and anguish; his voice cracks, forcing him to pause before pouring out his soul.

“What beat within my chest when you met me was a near-dead thing, filled with naught but pain and broken dreams.  That is true.  Yet it was your fierce belief in even one single kernel of good in me…in the world…that I held to.”

Francine’s face crumples, mirroring his.  Bennet reaches for her hands.

“You found and touched the last spark inside me.  You knit the pieces of my heart back together like it were one of your surgical miracles.”

Francine smiles at that, and Bennet breathes a little easier.

“And so it was – a miracle.  This heart you healed – it belongs to you.  Unguarded, unfettered – yours,” he finishes simply.

Francine’s emotions teeter on a knife’s edge.  She feels the secret within her swimming to the surface. 

“You owe me no debt, Ben,” she murmurs, needing to know his truest motivations.  “You must give your heart where you will.”

Bennet closes the gap between them.

“I would give it to the woman I cherish.”

Tearing up, Francine can barely make out her own speech for the joy ringing inside her.  “Never did I think I would hear a man say such words to me.”

Moisture seeps in beneath Bennet’s lashes as well.  “High time for someone to treat you right.”  He cups her face in his hands.  “Will you take me as your husband?”

“Yes,” Francine murmurs huskily, falling against his chest.  Their lips meet and linger, softly trading intimacies that well from deep within, more spiritual than sensual.  Above them, a shooting star writes an ancient blessing across the sky.

After a few eternal moments, Bennet dips his head, forelocks still touching, as he rustles inside his breast pocket.

“I have no proper ring but this,” he says, holding out a black velvet bag.

Gravely, Francine upends the pouch into her cupped palm, freeing a flat circlet that gleams brightly silver in the moonlight.  With her fingertip, she traces the design:  two endless, plaited knots, intertwined like the limbs of lovers, joined for eternity.

“The man in the shop in Cardigan said it was a symbol of love,” Bennet reports, a  bit tentative.  He’s had no higher schooling to know such histories himself.

“You were not duped,” Francine assures him.  “It is perfect -- for this place, for this night.  For us.” 

She offers her hand with a tremulous smile and he slips the ring past her knuckle, then guides her palm to his lips for a kiss.  Francine’s quick intake of breath, while seeming a genteel expression of romance, in fact presages her plunge into a deeper conversational current.

“Also perfect is your timing,” she says softly, enigmatically.  Gazing at him with eyes full of meaning, she guides Bennet’s fingers to cover her belly.

Francine sees the split second the realization dawns across his craggy face.  She waits, as the stunned silence drags on, as even the night insects seem to hush to her news.

Fretful thoughts fill her mind.  ‘Tis true, their efforts to prevent conception have frequently been an afterthought.  Spontaneity most often rules the day.  She can no more insist he interrupt, than she can take time ahead to place a sponge, or jump up afterwards for a lavage.  She has relied mainly on the math of fertility.

But there was that glorious first time…

“Bennet?”  Francine can bear no more quiet from him.  “Say something…anything...”  Her voice breaks.  “You are distressed?”

“Distressed?!” he eeks out gruffly, the spell broken.  “No, woman!”  He laughs heartily, pulling her into a ferocious embrace.  “I am dumbfounded!”  His physical fervor topples them both to the ground, giggling like teenagers.

“I never thought…at my age…” he confesses, giddy now.

Careless of grass stains, Francine stretches out and lies back in his arms, pulling  him close by his suspenders. 

“Some spirits grow more potent with age,” she suggest intimately.

Bennet’s only response is to cover her mouth with his, as Francine's body rises in eager passion.

And so passes the remainder of the night, in love-making and laughter, in star-gazing and plan making, as the moon arcs its path over the temple, until the sun makes its oh-so-early aestival appearance, to wash the lovers with the light of a new day.

 

 


End file.
